Yankee Doodle Paddy and Uncle Sammy: Ethnic Patriotism in Boston's Irish Catholic and Jewish Communities During World War I

Abstract This article examines how Boston's Irish Catholic and Jewish communities—the city's largest and most influential non-Protestant groups—navigated the pressures of ethnic identity and “100 percent Americanism” during World War I. Using a comparative local lens, it argues that the war fostered “ethnic patriotism” as a shared strategy through which immigrants claimed civic belonging while balancing distinct ethno-religious loyalties. Through enlistment, Liberty Loan drives, and wartime relief work, each group asserted their Americanness while translating Catholic social teaching and Jewish ethics into a civic language aligned with Wilsonian democracy and self-determination. At the same time, they linked transnational causes—Irish independence and Zionism—to American ideals, portraying nationalism abroad as consistent with loyalty at home. Yet ethnic patriotism was contested: class, generation, and ideology divided moderates from militants, while labor radicals challenged middle-class respectability politics. The unrest of 1917 to 1919 exposed the limits of inclusion amid persistent Yankee prejudice and the conditional nature of acceptance. Together, these communities’ wartime experiences reveal Americanization as a process of mutual transformation rather than one-sided assimilation. World War I thus emerges as a crucible in which pluralism was forged—contentiously and locally—redefining Americanness as a civic bond between heritage and citizenship.